HISTORY may recall this week and last as a period when the US twittering baby president trashed his allies and then cosied up close to Putin. Meanwhile here in the UK, the fortnight may also be remembered as the period when the serious negotiating impasse on Brexit finally came to a head.

In the following couple of days, Rees-Mogg and his band of Scottish and English Tory followers will probably either vote against the Trade Bill or abstain, leaving the government abjectly defeated.

The EU will probably reject the government’s trade white paper compromise as unworkable for Irish and other reasons.

Assuming the government doesn’t fall, I would suggest there is a very simple way to get through the crisis. Go to the country again – not with an election, but with a simple binary choice in a quickly arranged referendum, worded approximately as follows:

“The British Government’s negotiations in respect to withdrawal from the EU have resulted in the following two options on trade and future relationships between our country and the EU:

A) A trading agreement similar in most details to the agreement between Canada and the EU, or;

B) A trading agreement similar in most details to the agreement between Norway and the EU and including membership of the EU single market” ... followed by an instruction to choose your preferred option.

The Canada deal equates to a slightly softened hard Brexit and the Norway arrangement amounts to the softest Brexit now available short of actually staying in the EU. I would choose the Norway option.

All we need to do then is wait and see if the fourth referendum in this decade that Scots shall have voted in will finally produce the right result. Fourth referendum? Yep, Nick Clegg’s 2011 STV proportional representation one was pretty forgettable but, had the result gone the other way, there is no way that the Tories would have been able to lead us along this disastrous Brexit path.

As political chaos engulfs Britain, Putin and his puppet-like creation will be having a laugh in Helsinki (don’t believe me? I assure you, the Donald was PUTIN by Vladimir). They’ll have a laugh at Brexit and there’ll be a behind-the-scenes reference to a spot of interference perhaps in Britain, or the USA, Italy and more.

Sadly, in the UK we are not focused sufficiently on uncovering the truth about illegal poll interference. The super-wealthy backers of hard-right groups think they are immune from prosecution and unfortunately they may be right. Perhaps the best we’ll get is tougher laws to ensure poll interference can’t happen again.

We are living through a historically pivotal moment where true democracy is seriously at risk. Our votes are affected by persons and organisations who manipulate our choices both crudely in the traditional or the Rupert Murdoch way, or slyly and subtly in the the Cambridge Analytica or the Putin way. There is a pervasive feeling that we are heading deeper and deeper into the anti-democratic mire.

Already, we a have a US President whose more obvious and blatant lies amount to an average of almost six per day since he came into office, and in Britain we have arguably the worst ever government in the history of the country. There was blatant illegal interference with the EU referendum and goodness knows how many more polls.

From now on, in elections and in referendums, we have to swim against the visible tides and the dangerous currents below the surface and start getting it right again, as we sometimes did in the 20th century. There is simply no time left for more mistakes.

David Crines
Hamilton